LEECH AND HIS PREDECESSORS.
John Leech may be truly said to be sui generis; there has been nothing like him before his time, or since his bright and short career ended. It would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that existing between the works of Leech and those of his predecessors, at the head and front of whom must be placed Hogarth, who stands longo intervallo above any of his successors. In his terrible lashing of the vices and follies of his own time—vices and follies that are common to all time—Hogarth sometimes, though rarely, indulged in an exaggeration of character amounting to caricature. Leech dealt with the life about him in a totally different spirit; his was a lighter, a more genial, and a kinder hand. Unlike Hogarth, he made us laugh at the follies of our fellow-creatures, and would have nothing to do with their vices, though he has shown us in many examples how keen was his sympathy with the poor and the oppressed, and how intense was his hatred of the oppressor. The name of caricaturist is as inappropriate to Leech as it is to Hogarth, though instances may be found, as in Hogarth, of occasional indulgence in exaggeration. These examples are mostly to be found in the illustration of books which in themselves somewhat outrage the modesty of nature. Hogarth's pictures are often disfigured by a coarseness closely bordering on indecency; instances may, indeed, be found where the great artist has passed the border with revolting audacity. In the thousands of drawings by Leech, instead of the double entendre, we have some delightful trait of child-life; instead of the adulterous husband, we have paterfamilias living a healthy, happy life among his children, only amused at his schoolboy son's tricks played upon his sisters.
Consideration should, no doubt, be shown to Hogarth and his immediate successors in respect of the coarseness of the time in which they lived; certainly the works of Bunbury, Woodward, Rowlandson and Gillray require all the excuses that can be made for them. Compared to the two latter-named artists, the two former may be said to be harmless. In the hands of all four, however, caricature reigned triumphant.
Rowlandson had less excuse for the constant displays of vulgarity and ugliness that abound in his works, than the other designers, who were destitute of any sense of beauty. It was not so with Rowlandson. I have seen early drawings by him full of the charm of beauty in women: refined, and graceful. This power, which one would have thought was a part of the man's nature, vanished altogether as he advanced in life; swamped in the whirl of dissipation in which he lived, his originally better nature became utterly vulgarized by his surroundings. That Rowlandson had a certain very coarse humour, a facility in grouping masses of figures in large compositions, and a power of inventing faces and figures for which he had no authority in nature, cannot be denied; but there is always an intense vulgarity, in which the man seems to revel with as intense a pleasure.
Gillray altogether differed from Rowlandson, both in his subjects and in the way he treated them. In politics he was a savage partisan, lashing his opponents with merciless fury and cruel personality. Gillray was in art what Churchill was in literature. He had a grim humour all his own; witness his constant attacks upon Bonaparte, then, and always, the bête noire of this country. There are many examples in which the Corsican tyrant is made ridiculous, ferocious, or cowardly, according to the events of the time and the humour of the artist.
In a parody of Belshazzar's feast, Bonaparte, as Belshazzar, has caught sight of the writing on the wall; he looks with extended arms and an expression of cowardly horror at the warning. By his side sits the Empress, an outrage upon the fattest of fat women, ill-drawn and vulgar in the extreme. A man with a face hideous beyond the dreams of ugliness (caricature in excelsis) is devouring the Tower of London, which figures as a plat in the banquet; the rest of the guests round the monarch's table, vying with the dreadful gourmand in repulsiveness, are one and all caricatured out of nature. The meats provided for this singular entertainment consist of what may be called English fare, the pièce de résistance in front of Bonaparte, which he will presently demolish, being the Bank of England; and that indigestible dish is flanked by St. James's Palace. Then we have the head of Pitt, which is labelled "The Roast Beef of Old England," and served up appetizingly on a trencher, etc. Behind the Emperor stand his guards with huge uplifted sabres, from which blood is dripping, while behind the dropsical Empress stand her ladies-in-waiting, three female ghouls of wondrous hideousness, in dresses so décoletté as to shock persons less nice than Mrs. Grundy.
In another example the great Corsican is represented as "Teddy Doll, the great French Gingerbread Baker, drawing out a new Batch of Kings," while his man, Talleyrand, is making up the dough for others. Bonaparte is pictured in uniform, with boots and spurs, and a huge cocked-hat with an impossible feather, drawing out a batch of newly-made kings—Bavaria, Würtemburg, and Baden—from an enormous oven, labelled "New French Oven for Imperial Gingerbread." Beneath the oven-door is what is called "an ash-hole for broken gingerbread." Amongst the débris which has been swept into the ash-hole by a broom labelled "Corsican Besom of Destruction," Spain, a crowned death's head, is prominent; together with Austria, Holland, Switzerland, Venice, etc., "all in wild destruction blent." In the background Hanover is being destroyed by the Prussian Eagle, as Talleyrand is busy kneading up the dough to be presently passed from "the Political Kneading-Trough," to reappear in the shape of gingerbread kings of Poland, Turkey, and Hungary, after the manipulation of the King-maker and a visit to the French oven.
There is much grim humour in this piece, and humour as well as a deeper meaning in the parody of "Belshazzar's Feast"; but, turning from such work and the thoughts that arise from it to that of Leech is like turning from a slaughter-house to a flower-garden, from ugliness to beauty.
From the time of Gillray to that of Leech, there is little to be said of the caricaturists, with one splendid exception, "Immortal George." I do not agree with those who place Cruikshank above Leech. Cruikshank was essentially a caricaturist; Leech was not. Comparisons, as Mrs. Malaprop says, are "odorous," but we are sometimes forced into them; and, while admitting that there were certain paths—heights, perhaps—which Cruikshank ascended with honour, and on which Leech could not have found foothold, there was a highroad, bordered by beautiful things, on which he would have easily distanced his formidable rival.
In my young days the political drawings of "H. B.," the father of Richard Doyle, were much esteemed and in great request. They dealt solely with the political events of the hour, and, though feebly drawn and ineffective as works of art, the designer managed to produce unmistakable likenesses of Sir Robert Peel, the Duke of Wellington, et hoc genus, with remarkable certainty, and always without a trace of caricature.